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No, this isn’t an article about how the Internal Revenue Service is a corrupt, political tool, because it’s not---despite its ham-handed handling of Tea Party and other organizations’ applications for 501(c)(4) tax exemptions and the bonuses it indiscriminately paid to IRS employees behind on their own taxes.

The IRS is, however, an insular, often tone deaf and sometimes bumbling bureaucracy which is being starved of the resources it needs to do its job. Since 2010, its Congressional appropriations have fallen 7% ----and that’s in nominal dollars, before any adjustment for inflation. During the same period, its appropriations funded workforce has shrunk by 10%, with enforcement staff down 15%, according to numbers Congress’ Government Accountability Office released last week. Meanwhile, the tax agency’s workload has increased with the explosion of identity theft tax refund fraud; a 4% growth in returns filed; and new laws to administer, including the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare).

Even a relatively smooth recent tax return processing season couldn’t mask what the IRS Oversight Board calls, in testimony it is submitting to the Senate this week, “an alarming erosion in both customer service and enforcement that shows no signs of abating."

Consider this: During fiscal 2014, the IRS plans to audit only 4.2% of corporations with assets in excess of $10 million, down from 5.6% in 2013 and 6.2% in 2011. The individual taxpayer audit rate is expected to sink to just 0.80%, down from 0.96 % in 2013 and 1.1% in 2011. Last year, enforcement revenues from audits dropped $400 million to $9.8 billion, the lowest in a decade, even though there’s no indication that people are cheating less. (The IRS estimates that in 2006---the most recent years it has studied—the public voluntarily paid 83% of what it owed in a timely fashion, with enforcement and late payments bringing the compliance rate up to 85.5%.)

Olson, who’s known for worrying foremost about deteriorating taxpayer service, now considers enforcement to be at dangerously low levels too. “At some point if you keep stripping from enforcement, the word will get out to people that maybe the IRS hasn’t been catching stuff and that in terrorem effect will dissipate. That may take five years to show up,’’ she said.

As for service, the IRS reports that thanks to a lower volume of phone calls this past tax filing season, a higher than expected 73% of callers who tried to get through to a human at the IRS were able to do so. The agency attributes the reduced volume to fewer tax changes, but volume may also have been suppressed by headlines warning taxpayers not to even bother calling the IRS. Anyway, as seasonal phone staffing drops off, the IRS expects service to deteriorate, with an average of around 60% of callers getting through to a human during FY 2014 as a whole. The same pattern held last year too; during last July, August and September, only 3 out of 10 callers got through to a human being and those who did spent an average of more than half an hour on hold before breaking through.

Another indicator of declining service: the IRS has stopped answering “complex” tax law questions. Such as? Olson shared a few examples of what’s now on the IRS’ too hard for us list: “I deliver pizza for my employer using my car. How can I deduct my car expenses?” and “I received an inheritance. Do I have to report it?”

Even more alarming is the growing time it takes the agency to respond to taxpayers’ correspondence---a crucial service indicator since the IRS conducts 75% of its individual audits by mail and sends out millions of additional notices a year questioning some item on a tax return. When taxpayers write back with evidence of why they don’t owe more, they rightly expect someone at the agency to read their letter in a timely fashion. Yet at the end of fiscal 2013, the Oversight Board reports, 53% of taxpayer correspondence waiting to be worked was “overage”—meaning the IRS hadn’t responded within 45 days of receipt. That’s up from 28% at the end of FY 2010.

Sound bad? Things are likely to get a lot worse at the IRS before they get better. The Obama Administration has asked for a 10.5% ($1.2 billion) increase in funding for the agency for 2015, categorizing most of that as revenue raising initiatives that shouldn’t be subject to agreed budget caps.